Climate of touchiness augurs ill for India

Mamata's West Bengal is getting itself a reputation. First, a political scientist was imprisoned for the cardinal crime of sharing cartoons of the CM on Facebook.
A few days later, the West Bengal Board of Censorship banned posters of the film, Hate Story. One poster, deemed to be '

Mamata's West Bengal is getting itself a reputation. First, a political scientist was imprisoned for the cardinal crime of sharing cartoons of the CM on Facebook.

A few days later, the West Bengal Board of Censorship banned posters of the film, Hate Story. One poster, deemed to be 'obscene and provocative', featured the bare back of an actress with a pistol dangling in the foreground.

The ban was upheld by the Calcutta High Court; six other posters of the film were passed, provided the image of the back was blotted with blue ink. Vivek Agnihotri, the bewildered director of the film, is on record saying: "I'm surprised by the choice of blue ink over black. I guess these people had 'blue' film on their minds or maybe blue ink is cheaper".

Phenomenon

But this column is not about Mamata's Bengal, though her state has been at the forefront of this 'movement' I call The New Hypersensitivity. As we speak, her crack team is busy infiltrating social networking sites, looking for images and content that lampoon the leader. The Congress too banned The Red Sari, a novel, for it was felt that it portrayed the Supreme Leader, in a bad light. Peter Heehs was kept on tenterhooks for his visa - one of several examples of our intolerance, in this case, regarding Sri Aurobindo. The Indian government has repeatedly asked sites like YouTube to remove 'objectionable content', and backed it with the threat that in case of noncompliance, it will ask the sites to relocate their servers to India, a move that will enable the government to exercise tighter control.

The New Hypersensitivity is everywhere. It seems that our touchiness is directly proportionate to economic liberalisation. The more liberalised the economy gets, the more hypersensitive we are to remarks about our lives. At this rate, our touchiness will go through the roof once third generation reforms are introduced. Thankfully, according to Kaushik Basu, such reforms are not due until 2014; we can rest easily for the time being - our sensitivity levels should remain stable for now.

Ironically, in this climate of touchiness, the Gujarat CM, Narendra Modi, has emerged as an unlikely beacon of liberalism, both economic and moral. Modi has not bothered about what venom people are spewing against him on Facebook and other social networking sites. He has not gone on a banning spree. Maybe he is too thick skinned to bother about caricatures and cartoons and limericks - and that is the way it should be. It's a lesson other Indian politicians can learn from him.

On a serious note, the New Hypersensitivity raises some important questions about the kind of people we are. What are the implications for writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and academics that live and work in a society like ours? Are we really touchy as a people, more so than other societies?

To start with the last question first, I don't think we are touchier than people elsewhere. In a country of a billion plus, where we are all fighting for scarce resources, does the ordinary person have the time to be prickly? I doubt it. This constant struggle- whether to find good schools for our children, or a flat to live in, or a water or gas connection, makes us selfish, loud, aggressive, and insensitive to the needs of others. The facts of our circumstance and environment affect our personalities, both collective and personal, but it doesn't really make us insecure about our religion or community. To put it bluntly: we simply don't have the time.

The argument from sentiment, that the 'sentiments of a community' have been hurt (though in Oxford I was taught that the word 'feelings' is more appropriate than 'sentiments'), is more a ploy used by cynical politicians to extract political mileage, or as in the case of Mamata, to protect their own image. And if it's not politicians, it's very often a crank somewhere, most often a crazy mofussil advocate, who decides that his sentiments have been mauled, and the media then duly follows, blowing it up into a national controversy, like with the Shilpa Shetty-Richard Gere kiss. On paper, it looks like an entire community or nation is up in arms because 'Indian values have been transgressed', but in reality it is only one crank who is making an inordinate amount of noise. Our laws are faulty - how can a man be imprisoned for sharing a cartoon? How can some random individual somewhere be powerful enough to throw a spanner in the works of a filmmaker? It seems too easy - filing a case in a lower court in a far-flung town is good enough to make life difficult for the creative person.

Rules

At this stage, it might be useful to move the debate from the general to the specific. Let's talk about what this climate of touchiness means for creative individuals, with particular reference to obscenity.

For one, those of us who are involved in creative pursuits don't know what the rules are. This makes it confusing, for we don't know what's acceptable and what is not. There are no fixed rules which this society has evolved over the years. What was passed by the censor board in 1970 is suddenly not acceptable in 2012. What is obscene one Monday is not obscene the next Monday. Instead of having a debate and fixing things once and for all, we change our minds every week. We are not sure if we're moving forward in time or backwards. There isn't any pattern to our collective morality.

Let's take the example of books and obscenity in the Western context. The decision by Allan Lane, Penguin's founder, to publish an unexpurgated edition of the previously banned Lady Chatterley's Lover, provoked intense debates about obscenity. Maurice Girodias, whose father had published the likes of Henry Miller, started Olympia Press in 1953, in order to publish books in English that couldn't be published in America or England because of censorship.

Contrast

Those were conservative times; when Norman Mailer's Naked And The Dead came out in America, his publisher replaced the f- word with fug, all the way through the book. From Nabakov's Lolita to Donleavy's The Ginger Man to Burroughs' Naked Lunch , Girodias set a standard by publishing books in English in Paris long before their authors could publish them in US. A seminal movie on Allan Ginsberg's epic poem 'Howl', starring James Franco, provides us with a glimpse into the protracted court case fought by his publishers against charges of obscenity.

Where the West is different from us is that the issue of obscenity was sorted out after these trials. Western society had moved on permanently. Unlike us, it wasn't going to spend the next few decades in dj vu mode, revisiting the same old issues. We need to fix the limits of our morality in cement and concrete.

Every time a cartoon comes out, or a film poster is splashed all over a city, we cannot start wondering what is obscene and what offensive. Given the current climate, I'd rather be a cartoonist in North Korea, or a filmmaker in Iran, where there is little freedom, but at least the boundaries are etched in jagged glass. Clarity is better than confusion, and oppression more preferable to watery freedoms.

- The writer's new book The Butterfly Generation was published recently.

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